Retracing Suriname’s colonial history and remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

This year I somehow evaded or skipped the remembrance activities and publications around the end of slavery in the former Dutch Suriname in 1863. Frankly, I even thought we had already had manifestations about the act of emancipation a few years ago, in 2013! To me it seemed not entirely just to neglect the continuation of slavery in other parts of the Dutch colonial empire after 1863. The death of Natalie Zemon Davis on October 21, 2023 helped me to remember she did research, too, on the history of colonization and slavery in Suriname. In this post I would like to bring some strands of thought together, both to make some amendments for my omission earlier this year and to salute the work of a historian who inspired fellow-historians worldwide.

Remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis receiving the Holberg Prize in 2010 – photo by Holbergprisen – Flickr: davis stromgren8, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74162412en, tv. Erling S. Sandmo. Foto: Marit Hommedal/SCANPIX

French history was a key focus in the work of the late Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023). Much has been said the past weeks to honour her achievements, to remember with gladness her generosity and curiosity, and to put her scholarly work into various perspectives. She was a most inspiring example of a woman succeeding to enter into academia and reach the highest posts, thus opening doors for many other female historians. Social history gained its current position for Early Modern historians also to a substantial extent thanks to her pioneering research. I will not repeat here the fine tributes paid to her, such as those written by the faculty of history in Oxford, the Society of Renaissance Studies and the Central European University in Budapest. Some interviews with Natalie Zemon Davis remain very telling testimonies to her life, approaches and influence, for instance the one in Itinerario 39/1 (2015) 3-15, the 2008 interview for Medievalists, and for her connection to Suriname’s history the interview (in Dutch) originally published in the history journal Skript.

Three articles by Natalie Zemon Davis about Suriname attracted already years ago my attention at the blog Buku – Bibliotheca Surinamica of Carl Haarnack. He created digital versions – including PDF’s – of Davis’ articles on David Nassy (2010), colonial justice in Suriname (2011), and on Creole languages in Suriname (2009), originally published in Historical Research 82, issue 216 (2009) 268-284. Looking at the footnotes of these articles I smiled when read the old abbreviation A.R.A. for the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague, now called the Nationaal Archief. Davis was about to finish a study on eighteenth-century Suriname, and hopefully this work can be published soon.

Approaching the history of Suriname

On several occasions I wrote here posts about Suriname’s history, for example ina post about slavery (2013), a post on archival resources for Suriname’s legal history (2017), the slave registers of Suriname (2018) and similar registers for the island Curaçao (2020), and last but not least a post concerning the city Middelburg in the province Zeeland and the role of its commercial company in the eighteenth-century Dutch slave trade (2021). These posts seem to me still interesting. The only snag with the oldest contributions are the changes in the way the Dutch national archives present their information online. The Nationaal Archief had good reasons to follow the example of the British National Archives to maintain two websites or at least separated subdomains for searching information about their holdings on one side, and on the other information about its organisation. Thus a number of links in my posts is now broken, because no action was taken to create redirects, in itself surely a major task, but not wholly strange to helping the general public, scholars and anyone interested and thus also providing stable services.

I had preferred not to add anything about the lack of true multilingual presentation and search interfaces on the current website of the Nationaal Archief. The current English version of the overview of indexes at the Nationaal Archief to many record series, including series on Aruba, Curaçao, Indonesia, Suriname and the two major trading companies for the Dutch East and West Indies, are shown with untranslated titles, referring you to the translation function of your browser which might not work as historically sound as proper translations would be. However, the new language button does now offer eight languages. Only for English a condensed standard version of the website exists. It is a pity you can navigate only in Dutch directly to the important zoekhulpen (research guides) on Suriname, Curaçao, Indonesia, colonial history and slavery. On the other hand, the website of the Nationaal Archief Suriname in Paramaribo seems to be entirely written in Dutch.

You might want me to end this lament and look at things differently! The really remarkable and even worrying thing to note is the lack of attention to the use and existence of exclusive language in finding aids and research guides, apart from notices in the guides for Suriname and Indonesia. The volume Staat & slavernij. Het Nederlandse koloniale slavernijverleden en zijn doorwerkingen [State and slavery. The Dutch colonial slavery past and its consequences], Rose Mary Allen et alii (eds.) (Amsterdam 2023), a major commemorative publication of historical essays accompanied by a website, pinpoints as one of the problematic things about doing research about the place of slavery in Dutch history the very use of language with its implications, explicit or hidden bias, political agendas or worse. The thirty authors in this volume wrote essays of generally ten pages, interspersed with short contributions on research methods and some sources, and some interviews. They cover subjects both about the past and the current Netherlands to highlight the fact vIews do not stem from a viewpoint above space and time. On purpose the articles on the oldest periods have been placed last, yet another way to break through commonly held assumptions, even if this reversal of chronological order and sequences has its setbacks, too. The great strength of this volume is the use of multiple perspectives and the wide coverage of themes and periods.

Finding digitized books on Suriname’s history

Reading Davis’ articles on the history of Suriname and visiting the Buku blog of Carl Haarnack rekindled my interest in finding online digitized materials for this subject. My own list of digital libraries concerning Suriname on my webpage for digital libraries was rather short, and thus I started to check the existing links and to search for other relevant collections.

Let’s start at Amsterdam. The old subdomain for digitized cultural heritage held by the Universiteit van Amsterdam responded with an error message. The combined special collections of the university library and museum Allard Pierson brings you quickly to its search portal with at the bottom of the landing page an overview of the main collections, including the Surinamica collection. The page for this collection does currently not point to the availability of digitized items. As in the old configuration books and prints have been digitized within the image database where an overview of digitized heritage collections is now very much absent. There is only a free text search, not an advanced search mode, but you can apply several filters for your search results. To the best of my knowledge it seems at first hardly any item has been newly digitized during the last five years or added to the hundred items. Even the major Suriname exhibition at Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk in 2020 clearly did not work as a spur to digitize more items of this rich collection. However nice the new layout looks, navigating to the things you look for could considerably be enhanced. In my humble opinion a fresh look with a decolonizing view to the state of things at this website can help to make things truly accesible for anyone.

Leiden University Library manages also the collection of the KITLV, the Royal Dutch Institute for Caribbean history. Within the digital collections presented by the university library in Leiden there is no separate collection for Suriname. The number of results in a free search for Suriname is large, but a substantial number of items can only be viewed with restrictions. The catalogue of the exhibition Suriname in beweging (2015 is available online.

Natalie Zemon Davis was impressed by the Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (…) (Paramaribo 1788), written by a group of learned Jewish men with Portuguese ancestors. It was only natural for me to start searching for a digital version of this work, but it took a while to realize I searched for it with the name of just one author, David de Isaac Cohen Nassy, actually using only Nassy… In this book the names of the authors appear only in abbreviated forms. A number of libraries catalogued this work under the name of one of the other authors, Moses Pa. de Leon, the first name mentioned in the dedicatory letter. Several copies have been digitized by Google. At Leiden a copy of the KITLV has been digitized within the digital collections. The Hathi Trust Digital Library provides both the original edition and a digital version of a reprint (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1968).

At his blog Carl Haarnack pointed in 2013 at the Dutch version of this work, Geschiedenis der kolonie Suriname (…) (Amsterdam-Harlingen 1791). A copy of this work has been digitized for the Delpher platform. The Allard Pierson does itself no service by simply forgetting to mention at its website the earlier very substantial digital contributions to Delpher from 2013 onwards. Hiding an obvious and important thing is a neutral description of this situation. Luckily, the main library catalogue of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, CataloguePlus, does bring you safely and smoothly to items digitized at Delpher, even to its own digitized copy of the Essai historique. Delpher and other digital portals are mentioned on the help page for finding rare and old works. To be fair, it would be interesting to check the websites of other contributing institutions for any clear mentioning of their partnership with Delpher.

I would have dearly liked to sketch a more positive image of the current state of affairs concerning the digital presence of cultural heritage about and from Suriname at the two institutions presented here above, but it seemed helpful to give here more details and impressions about them. At my webpages on Old Dutch law and digital libraries in Europe you can find more Dutch digital libraries.

At Buku Carl Haarnack pointed in 2015 to the Suriname collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel. He writes about a number of rare works touching Suriname. I checked for them in the general catalogue of the HAB. Soon I noticed not every work about Suriname has received this keyword as a major element in its catalogue record. You will notice with me the presence in this catalogue of digitized items held elsewhere. The webpage on the Digitale Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel does offer much information, but it does not clearly state that the core digital collection of the Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek does bring you only to digitized manuscipts, worse from its main page you cannot even reach the search interface for its digitized manuscripts. Some stress on the fact digitized copies of Early Modern German printed works held at the HAB can be found quickly using the bibliographies VD16 and VD 17 would be useful, too. In my view here, too, the viewpoint from outside can help to fill such lacunae which hinder in particular new visitors. My deep admiration for the rich holdings at Wolfenbüttel and the fine fleet of digital initiatives of the HAB made me curious about this part of their collections, and I simply had not expected the present state of guidance.

The powers of history

Doing colonial history and invoking the help of digital libraries or archives is not yet as straightforward as you would like it to be. Historians past and present have to tackle hindrances and perhaps above all to recognize their own blind spots, the limits of their discipline and also the working of library catalogues, bibliographies and finding aids, be they in print or online. It can be fun to find out the tricks of the trade, but at the same time you realize how difficult it can be for outsiders to enter this world.

Natalie Zemon Davies shows for me her greatness again in tackling the difficulties of combining colonial and Jewish history with resources often but not only written in Dutch. It is now decades back I first read her books The return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA-London, 1983) and Fiction in the archives. Pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (Cambridge-Stanford, CA, 1987), publications I mentioned here in a post on the legal document genre of factums (2016). Natalie Zemon Davis loved telling stories which stand for much more than only their factual content. Fictionized tales and the very bias they show helped her to gain insights you might easily overlook. Her narrative approach was in a way also a quiet protest against too strong reliance on large datasets and statistical treatment of data. Musing about the impact of historians I was truly touched by the closing words of Natalie Zemon Davis’ contribution to the online series Why Become a Historian? of the American Historical Association. She expressed her enduring love for history, and wanted to see history as “a source of sober realism, but also a source of hope”.

A postscript

After correcting a number of typos, some of them rather silly, I realized something else, too, the omission of an important step by the Allard Pierson, the recent appointment of a staff member to investigate ways for decolonizing its heritage collections. Inadvertently I had also left a confusing sentence about its copy of the Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam. The Allard Pierson’s copy has been digitized and is available at Delpher.

Suriname’s slavery registers unbound

On July 1, 1863 slavery was officially abolished in Suriname. A ten-year transitional period followed during which former slave owners received a monetary compensation for each former slave. Since many years people originally coming from Suriname celebrate in The Netherlands on July 1 the feast of Keti Koti, “The Breaking of the Chains”. It is only fitting that last week the digital version of slave registers kept between 1830 and 1863, now hold by the Nationaal Archief of Suriname (NAS) in Paramaribo, was launched by a number of institutions led by Coen van Galen at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and Maurits Hassankhan at the Anton de Kom Universiteit van Suriname, with support from the Dutch National Archives in The Hague.

Last year I reported here on the project to move a number of archival collections concerning the history of Suriname from the Dutch Nationaal Archief to the NAS, and to digitize also a number of these collections. Collections with relevancy to legal history figure large among them. The digitization of the slavery registers is a key element completing the efforts for digital access and conservation, indexing the registers and making them much more accessible for researchers and the general public worldwide. In this post I will look at these registers and their online presence.

A crowdsourcing project

In January 2017 the project for indexation and digitization of these slavery registers started, just after the transfer of important archival collections from The Hague to Paramaribo. A campaign with the slogan Maak de Surinaamse slavenregister openbaar, “Make the Surinam slavery registers public”, proved effective. Some 600 people donated money for the project, and some 400 volunteers helped indexing the registers. To put the record straight, anyone could and can come to these archives to gain access to the original volumes, provided their material state is not too fragile. It is safe to assume that you need to come with good arguments to touch them now they can be consulted online. The Dutch National Archives did already provide public access. The operation to bring archival collections back to Suriname created a more urgent need for conservation and digitization.

The digitized registers now in Paramaribo [NAS, toegang (finding aid) 16, inv.nrs. 1-43] can be accessed using an index form shown above. On purpose the NAS has not placed these registers among its forty digitized archival collections. The Dutch National Archives provide also online access to the slavery registers among its ever-growing set of online indexes. You can download the index in its entirety (4,2 MB, zipped file). At this point something becomes clear when you look at the URL of this file, a web address in The Netherlands at the search portal Ga het NA of the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. The search form of this digital resource at both archives is almost, but not completely identical.

Accessing the slavery registers

You can use either a simple search form (Eenvoudig zoeken) with three fields, one for a free text search and two fields for setting a period, or go to Uitgebreid (Advanced search) with more fields. In the second mode there are additional fields from the slave name, the name of the mother, and the name of the slave owner. You can click on the search results in order to get both the information on a person, including also gender, references to the registers and the type of register – with its inventory and page number – and an image of the page in question. It is possible to zoom in at will to any image. Each scan has an individual URL, a URL from my country when viewing individual results, meaning there is one single database behind the two versions. By clicking on the field name in the results you can change their order. You will find either the names of owners or the name of the plantation and its location.

It is not my purpose to single out here any defects and omissions, but a few things are very visible. First of all the version hosted in The Hague contains additional information which is not or not yet provided at the website of the NAS. The section Achtergrond (Background) informs you about the information given in the search fields, with a second page about slavery in Suriname and the introduction of slavery registers and their survival. There are important losses, not in the least some registers of slaves owned by the Dutch colonial government. In the registers mutations such as birth and death, acquisitions and sales should be written down. A third page on Gebruik (Use) contains instruction on the use of the indexes and the interpretation of results, and also a handy list of common abbreviations in the registers. The other pages contain a colophon about the project and the user license (CC-BY-SA 3.0 NL).

A second thing to note is the incomplete translations in the English version of the search form. Even the simple search form has not yet been translated completely. The field names in the results screen have not been translated. A much sillier thing becomes also visible: In cases where there is no gender information, the volunteers entered the word Leeg (Empty). I suppose there are more concise and effective ways to convey the fact that no data have been entered in a particular field.

Viewing the context

Using to a large extent at this moment only Dutch for this project is not a particular lucky thing, and you can even extend this to the project website. Translations in languages such as English and Sranantongo are not just welcome, they are simply needed to really open this resource to people worldwide with interest in Caribbean history, the history of slavery or Dutch colonial history. For any project on Dutch colonial history in the East Indies contemplating translations into English and/or Bahasa Indonesia is luckily a natural thing. The project team states flatly these registers are a worldwide unique resource, the only series of its kind. On the project website some further, rather important explanations about the actual state of the slavery registers are offered. It appears no general index to the series existed. Some registers could be consulted on microfiches, but without one or more indexes searching would mean wandering in a jungle without much hope for any results. The thing to note here is that only in 2017 the need for an index was perceived as sufficiently urgent to start a project to deal with this sorry situation. Earlier on having only severely hampered access seems not to have led to constructive action. Van Galen and Hassankhan rightly stress the importance of the slavery registers for not only genealogical research, but as a key resource to connect with the manumission registers, neighbourhood registers of the city Paramaribo and other sources for Suriname’s history during the nineteenth century. The historic context and the slavery registers can enrich the information contained in them in both directions.

Surely we need to thank Coen van Galen and Maurits Hassankhan and the army of volunteers who succeeded in getting their tasks completed in time. Van Galen and Hassankhan provide on the project website a very useful page with four PDF’s with information that should immediately be included on the websites of  both versions of the online index. The project leaders provide a list with the names of plantations and other Dutch posts in 1834 (530 kB), a list with the names of free people in Paramaribo in 1846 (2,2 MB), both created by Huub van Helvoort, a list with first names of enslaved people on a number of plantations (70 kB), and even a list of letter forms, letter combinations and some Dutch words in nineteenth-century Dutch script (650 kB). It is good to see some basic historical skills are not forgotten! However, to my disbelief I did not find on the project website the URL of the index, not even after a few days… The slogan Open the slavery registers seems to have been at least temporarily forgotten by the web team. More down to earth, the current summer heat in my country, the gulf of enthusiasm about the launch, and the very end of the academic year created perfect excuses for forgetting to open literally the doors to the final results of the project also at the project website. The absence of news items from June and July 2018 is another indication for the sleeping state of the project website.

Such omissions and minor problems can be fixed quickly. I would urge anyone involved with this project to proceed as soon as possible with distributing lacking information to both versions and completing the translations. This succesful project well deserves this last effort to remove the barriers and chains which hindered easy access and practical use. The slavery registers of Suriname deserve interest from many corners.

A postscript

The uniqueness of these slave registers should be considered in the light of the presence of similar registers held at the Nationaal Archief Curaçao (005, Archief Koloniale Overheid, inventory 3, Hoofdambtenaar Arbeidszaken, inv.nos. 53-60 (slavery registers), and 005 Archief Koloniale Overheid, inventory 16.6, Burgerlijke Stand/Bevolking/Registratie, inv.nos 116-117 (emancipation registers). The eight slavery registers have 1070 folia). In August 2020 I reported here about digital access to these registers from Curaçao, and in that case, too, the Dutch Nationaal Archief provides access to them, and again in a slightly but significantly different way. Okke ten Hove righly commented that you should view slavery registers in connection with manumission registers and other resources.

Finding Suriname’s legal history

Storage of archival records ready for return to Suriname – photo by F. van Dijk, Nationaal Archief, The Hague

Dutch colonial history is a subject which since 1975 with the Surinam independence sometimes came into view and in other periods seemed to recede into the shadows of neglect and disinterest. The activities surrounding the remembrance of the abolition of slavery in Suriname have rekindled public attention for this subject in the Netherlands. Since many years the Dutch National Archives helps the Nationaal Archief Suriname (NAS) in Paramaribo in creating finding aids and preparing the transfer of archival collections from The Hague to Paramaribo.

Apart from actions for the physical records of these collections, such as restoration and much more, digitization is one of the approaches to make them more accessible both for the people of Suriname and for everyone interested in their history. This week a tweet by the search platform Ga het NA – best translated as “Check it at the NA” – of the Nationaal Archief (@gahetNA) alerted to the online availability of 3,5 million scans, substantial results which merit attention. However, since much information on the websites of these two national archives is only given in Dutch I will provide here a concise guide to a number of the materials which touch aspects of Suriname’s legal history. The translation tools of the famous Grand Omnipresent Web Firm can redeem to some extent the problem of languages, but some guidance is helpful.

My interest in these digital archives grows steadily this month because I have at last added a page about digital archives in the digital corner of my legal history website Rechtshistorie. Adding the collections concerning Suriname certainly fills a gap. Instead of preparing this new page in silence and deploring its incompleteness I might as well invite you to look at it, and contribute your own constructive suggestions.

A tale of archives

In the forty years of Suriname’s independence much had to be done to provide the new nation with a proper national archive. Dutch support was certainly helpful, but not always completely welcome. The history of Suriname is documented in many archival collections at the Dutch Nationaal Archief, not only in those strictly dealing with parts of the Dutch colonial empire. A start at this more general level can illustrate this rapidly. At Ga het NA you can use 115 online indexes. An alphabetical overview of them takes three web pages. The first page contains for example a guide for Ghana, a country connected to Latin America by the slave trade. At the second page you should not only look for Suriname, but also for the West-Indies, in particular an index for pensions of civil officers. The third page continues with more indexes concerning Suriname and three indexes dealing with the Dutch West-Indian Company, one for the registration of investments at its Amsterdam branch (Kamer van Amsterdam) and two concerning the Dutch period in Brazil.

In the absence of a good site map at Ga het NA I have to refer you to the Dutch version of the fine research guide for Surinam history. You will quickly understand that politie stands for the police force, notarieel refers to matters dealt with by notaries, and the gouverneurs are the governors. The Raad van Justitie (1671, 1718-1828) and its successor, the Hof van Civiele en Criminele Justitie, were the main judicial courts. The Hof van Politie en Criminele Justitie (1684-1828) was another important court dealing with cases concerning public order and criminal offenses. The Rechtbank van Kleine Zaken was a minor court dealing with smaller cases. The Militaire Gerechtshof was the military court. The section for maps (kaarten) is also generous. Maps in the archival collection of the Topografische Dienst, the Dutch National Cartographic Service, have been digitized, as is the case for the collections Buitenland Kaarten Leupe and Leupe Supplement. The guide gives you also a succinct bibliography and some links to other websites. It would be most helpful to see immediately in such overviews where online scans are available, because this is exactly what many people today will foremost check for at any website. In a post about 200 years Dutch cadastral office I mention more collections with maps concerning Dutch colonial history.

Here the NAS scores clearly with a section simply called Archieven online. This overview contains currently 35 archival collections. The largest digitized collection with some 590,000 scans has been created by the secretaries of the government between 1722 and 1828, with some materials even dating from 1684 (Gouvernementssecretarie van de Kolonie Suriname, finding aid 1.05.10.1). Here you will find in particular some registers with plakkaten, ordinances (nos. 612 (1684-1782), 742 (an alphabetical index, 1781-1829), 788 (after 1796-1827)). Finding aid 1.05.11.14, Oud Notarieel Archief is the second largest collection with online scans. You can access here nearly half a million scans of notarial registers written between 1699 and 1828. The nos. 758-768 for the period 1707-1803 are registers of letters of exchange and other documents concerning trade, in particular maritime trade. Register 911 comes from John Martyn, “public notary residing at Paramaribo” between 1809 and 1814, during the period of English rule over Suriname. When you want to approach Suriname’s legal history from a comparative perspective such sources are invaluable.

The only digitized surviving case record of the military court of Suriname, 1839 – NAS/NA, 1.05.11.5, no. 1, fol. 1r

For a combined civil and criminal court in Suriname, you can find digitized archival records in finding aid 1.05.11.13, Hof van Civiele en Criminele Justitie (1828-1832; 2,100 scans). For the same period there are scans of records from the Commissie tot de Kleine Zaken, a court for minor offences (finding aid 1.05.11.4; 533 scans). The collection for its forerunner with almost the same name, College van Commissarissen voor Kleine Zaken in Suriname (1740-1828) (finding aid 1.05.10.05) contains some 133,000 scans. The digitized records of the military court (Militair Gerechtshof) boil down to scans of a single case heard in 1839 (1.05.11.5). Among the 35 digitized collections I would like to point also to the Gecombineerde Weeskamer (1788-1828) (1.05.11.12; nearly 68,000 scans), an institution which dealt not only with orphans, but also with custody cases and belongings (boedels). A major addition to our knowledge of Jews in Latin America are the digitized records of the Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente (1678-1909). Finding aid 1.05.11.18 gives you some 155,000 scans. You will find among the notarial registers mentioned above some volumes written by jewish jurators. By the way, the scans are currently hosted on a server of the Dutch National Archives. The faded quality of the case record shown here is a useful reminder how much work it takes to preserve and restore to useable conditions of records which survived tropical conditions and will return to a country near the equator.

The NAS adds a generous links selection (in Dutch). Hopefully versions in Papiamentu (Sranantongo), English and Spanish will soon be added, following the example of the recently launched Dutch Caribbean Digital Platform, created by the Dutch Royal Library, the University of Curaçao and Leiden University. Its Dutch Caribbean Heritage Collections contains a few digitized books concerning law and government. Let’s not forget the general overview of archival collections held by the NAS. You can trace some 1,100 documents for Suriname and read transcriptions of legislative text using the portal The Dutch in the Caribbean World, c. 1670-c.1870 of the Huygens Instituut, recently moved to Amsterdam.

Even this concise introduction to a few highlights taken from a huge number of digital scans should convince you that the two national archives can be proud of their efforts to digitize, preserve and disclose priceless records of a country and a people. Suriname’s present condition is not at all good, but nevertheless it will hopefully help to have both physical and virtual access to records from another period where law and justice did not always reign supreme. Luckily having the originals back in Suriname goes together with creating worldwide access.

A postscript

In January 2017 started also a crowdfunding project to create online access to the slave registers of Suriname.

Remembering slavery

How to deal with major questions, problems and conflicts in history? How should one write about them as a blogger? Subjects such as the abuse of power, law and justice, the undeniable role of violence, wars, the exclusion of people from society, and the outright systematic persecution of people for whatever reason, cry out for probing questions and research from many perspectives. Here I have promised several times not to avoid such themes and problems. One of the reasons that my first posting of 2013 occurs only late in January is exactly devoting time to one of the subjects which cannot be excluded from legal history. In my country the abolition of slavery in Suriname in 1863 will be commemorated. In this post I will look at some publications and websites dealing both with slavery as a general subject and with the history and aftermath of slavery in Suriname. Until 1975 Suriname, situated between British and French Guyana, was a Dutch colony. I will not aim at any kind of exhaustive treatment of the abolition of slavery in this country.

Slavery and Suriname

The commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Suriname in the year 1863 has thus far in particular received attention on Dutch television in the NTR-VPRO series De slavernij [Slavery] broadcasted in 2011. The series centered around the search of the Dutch singer Roué Verveer for his ancestry. The very fact that background information was presented by a well-known Dutch anchorwoman was criticized by some people complaining she figured as a kind of all-knowing presenter high above the black singer who seemed only to ask questions which he could not answer himself. Whatever the value of this critique, in the book accompanying the series, De slavernij. Mensenhandel van de koloniale tijd tot nu [Slavery. Human traffic from colonial times until the present] (Amsterdam 2011) edited by Carla Boos and a team of scholars, his quest for the history of his family is barely touched upon.

The website of the series presents a very well equipped nutshell guide to genealogical research for Surinam ancestors. In fact it is a model of its kind, and I have searched in vain for a similar comprehensive treatment of the subject at other websites. Surely, the Dutch Nationaal Archief offers a guide to its own online databases concerning slavery in Suriname, even in English. It is one thing to have access to digitized manumission and emancipation registers, but knowing how to use them is a prerequisite dealt with very clearly at the TV series website. A possible complaint about the website is much more a request, the need for translation of the Dutch version into English and Papiamento. The book by Carla Boos offers a very readable and lavishly illustrated introduction to the history of slavery in general, the slave trade in Africa, the Dutch Atlantic slave trade, slavery in Suriname and its living memory. The choice of documents written by all kind of people to tell stories from inside is excellent. The only things missing are a good overview of the images, and registers for subjects and names.

On a website for Dutch history on television and radio you can find several earlier items in a dossier on slavery, for example on the slave trade between Vlissingen (Flushing) in Zeeland, the Dutch fortress Elmina in Ghana, and Tobago in the Caribbean. Some digitized books about the history of Suriname can be found in the project Early Dutch Books Online (EDBO) which focuses on the period 1780-1800. In its digital collection Suriname 1599-1975 the library of the University of Amsterdam has digitized several old maps of Suriname and a small number of books, including the Dutch translation of Johan Gabriel Stedman’s book about his travels. You can also view an abridged version of this translation on a separate website – using Shockwave – but you can use more easily the complete version at EDBO. In the Digital Library for Dutch Literature you can find not only novels concerning Suriname and books in Dutch by authors from Suriname, but also the text of several editions of the Surinaamsche Almanak from 1820 onwards. This yearbook contains for example lists of plantations, their locations, owners and administrators. Documentation about the sea voyages made by slaves and their traders can be found in particular in the online database concerning the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of Emory University.

Slave traders and slaves – image from http://www.ninsee.nl

The activities for this year’s commemoration of the abolition of slavery can be followed most easily using the website of the NinSee in Amsterdam, the Dutch central institute for the study of the Dutch slavery past and heritage. The NinSee publishes studies and source editions in its own publication series. However, in my opinion it is a failure this website offers its information only in Dutch. If I have learned just one thing from the 2011 tv series it is exactly you cannot isolate the history of slavery from general history. The selection of scholarly literature about Dutch and Atlantic slavery on the website does redress this imbalance a bit. The NinSee institute is housed almost next door to the municipal archive of Amsterdam. Digitized old maps of Suriname are abundantly present on the website of the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute. At the Memory of the Netherlands portal for digitized collections concerning the Dutch cultural heritage you will find many thousand digitized objects related to Suriname from a number of Dutch collections. Among them are apart from the Royal Tropical Institute the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam – its main website can be viewed in seven languages, and the collection can be searched at a separate subdomain – and the Royal Netherlands Institute of South East Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden, with its own digital image library. Six Dutch ethnological museums work together for a portal website where you can search their collections, but you can still search online separately in the collections of the Museum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden or its library catalogue. Perhaps it is wise to mention here also the project Caribisch Erfgoed [Caribbean Heritage] for the digitization of photographs taken between 1886 and 1970 by the Brothers of Tilburg, a Catholic educational congregation long active in Suriname.

At the start of a commemoration year leading up to the first of July, the very day on which in 1863 the abolition of slavery in Suriname was formally proclaimed, it becomes increasingly clear for me how important it is to view this history from many perspectives. While reading about Suriname I had also on my desk Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial. Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2011). Last year I wrote a post about the Athenian democracy, and I am sure I will learn more about it when taking the role of slavery in ancient Greece into account. Learning about slavery also sheds light on the practice of commemorations in contemporary society. One of the commemorations I will surely write about here in 2013 is the bicentenary of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

A postscript

At the website of the Stichting Oud-Vaderlands Recht, the Foundation for the History of Old Dutch Law, Dutch readers can find an overview of exhibitions, symposia, recent publications and websites concerning Suriname and slavery. One of the most salient new digital projects is an interactive map of the houses of slaveholders in Amsterdam in 1863 created by Dienke Hondius and her history students at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.